In a 90-day window from January through March 2026, three large employers filed WARN notices closing or downsizing Inland Empire facilities:
- Nestlé — Jurupa Valley (3450 Dulles Drive). 88 jobs. Filed January 12. Closure complete March 13.
- Wabash National — Moreno Valley (94 jobs at 22135 Alessandro Boulevard) + Perris (6 at 1190 Harley Knox). 100 jobs total. Filed January 5. Complete March 6.
- Frito-Lay (PepsiCo Foods) — Rancho Cucamonga (Archibald Avenue). 248 jobs. Filed February 10. Closing June 2026.
That's ~436 IE industrial jobs gone in roughly a quarter, across three different sub-sectors (food distribution, transportation manufacturing, snack distribution). Reported by Patch and KTLA.
The stated reasons
Each company offers a different explanation:
Nestlé — global restructuring tied to a new 700,000 sq ft distribution center at Tejon Ranch Commerce Center (between LA and Bakersfield), which opened August 2025. Translation: the Jurupa facility was consolidated into a newer one further north.
Wabash National — "soft demand and tariff pressures." The company reported approximately $1M in tariff-related expenses in its most recent Q3 fiscal year, primarily vendor price increases.
Frito-Lay — "declining sales and rising costs." The Rancho Cucamonga site had already halted production a year earlier; the June 2026 closure is the final wind-down.
What the three have in common
Three different reasons, but two patterns connect them:
- Each is a national/multinational consolidating regionally — none of these are "the IE failed" stories. They're parent-company decisions made in boardrooms outside the region, where the IE happened to be one of the operations being optimized.
- All three are traditional industrial categories — food distribution, traditional manufacturing, snack distribution. Sectors that have powered the Inland Empire economy for two decades.
What's interesting in context
While these three were filing WARN notices, Riverside specifically was courting a different kind of manufacturer. Ohmio (NZ) opened operations for electric autonomous shuttles. Voltu (Argentina) opened EV power systems. The Public Utilities Board recommended $3M for EV chargers.
The bet is that clean-tech manufacturing replaces what's leaving. That bet may pay off. It also may not arrive at the scale needed to absorb the workers being released. 436 industrial jobs is a lot. EV cluster jobs at scale are still hypothetical. That's the gap to watch.
What to track
- Reuse of the closed facilities. Three large warehouses come back to market. Who leases them shapes the next decade's industrial mix in the IE.
- Riverside's EV manufacturer pipeline. Specifically, hiring numbers from Ohmio and Voltu over the next 12 months. Are they at scale or boutique?
- Upcoming WARN notices. California's WARN tracker shows manufacturing accounts for ~20% of statewide WARN-notice workers. The IE share is climbing.
For homeowners and renters along these corridors — Mira Loma, Alessandro, Archibald — the displacement matters. Local discretionary spending shifts when 100+ households at a single facility lose their primary income. That's a slower-moving signal but a real one.